Gary Bettman worked for the NBA before he became commissioner of the NHL, while Donald Fehr led Major League Baseball’s union before he became the executive director of the NHLPA. Over the course of CBA negotiations and the NHL lockout, both men have pointed to their former employers as having the right system to promote not only healthy business, but competitive balance.

Over the last seven years, though, both Bettman and Fehr are wrong on the latter front. Since the 2004-05 lockout, the league with the most competitive balance, at least as far as championships and playoff appearances are concerned, has been—wait for it—the NHL.

While a small-market team like the San Antonio Spurs can be successful in the NBA, and while the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland A's have shown a path for lower-revenue baseball franchises, hockey is the sport that most regularly has teams emerge from nowhere to stun their better-heeled opposition.

The NHL, which has had seven Stanley Cup winners in as many seasons, 29 of 30 teams make the playoffs and 23 teams win at least one playoff round, does not need to create competitive balance—it needs to ensure the continuation of it. If the question is whether to follow a path closer to the NBA or MLB's, it is worth examining the financial forces at play with regard to competitive balance in basketball and baseball.

Championships over a short term are not an exact measure of competitive balance, though, because only one team wins each year. But at almost each level of the playoffs, the NHL has the edge, and it should be noted that while six MLB teams have failed to make the postseason in the last seven seasons, all but the Kansas City Royals and Pittsburgh Pirates would have under the current format, in which eight teams per league go to the postseason—and who knows if such a system would have led those teams to operate differently?

Perhaps the nature of each sport primes more baseball and hockey teams for extended postseason runs. Or, to use Billy Beane’s logic, maybe the playoffs are just a crapshoot.

So, what about the regular season? In each of the three long-haul leagues, spending money generally correlates to winning. There are exceptions, of course—the New York Knicks have spent $64 million more than any team in the NBA over the past seven seasons, with disastrous results, while the Nashville Predators and Rays have assembled consistent contenders on the cheap.

While the ties between spending and winning appear strong, there is something hidden in the numbers, and it is evident from the more “squished” nature of a graph of NBA payrolls and wins, compared to graphs of MLB and NHL figures.

In the NBA, the Bobcats have paid $419,026,327 over the past seven seasons, 60.4 percent of the Knicks’ total of $694,283,431. In baseball, the Pirates’ $326,060,365 outlay is only 23.3 percent of what the Yankees have spent, a whopping $1,401,817,596. That explains the difference as well as anything, even if the Knicks stink—take their wild spending out of the equation, and the Bobcats have spent 66.4 percent as much as the Mavericks.

The NHL, with its salary cap, is naturally more similar to the NBA, but hockey’s last CBA was not as strong for the owners as basketball’s—the battle that Bettman is fighting right now. Over the past seven seasons, the Islanders, at $231,495,160, spent 57.4 percent as much as the Flyers.

Those charts might be about what you'd expect, but the average money spent per victory, using USA Today’s salary database, paints a very different picture of the three leagues.

While the Rays have paid $587,736 per victory since 2006, the lowest rate in baseball, and the Predators have paid an NHL-low $955,873 per win, take a look at the NBA’s list:

And here’s the list of the NBA teams that have paid the most for each victory in the past seven seasons:

Now compare that to MLB’s top and bottom five in cost per victory:

In basketball, by and large, successful teams get more bang for their buck, while in baseball, the teams who pay the most for each victory are the richest in the game. MLB's system provides greater on-field competitive balance than the NBA, which has had only nine franchises win championships in the past 30 years. The NBA is a star-driven league, and teams without stars (or in the case of the Knicks, lesser stars) find themselves paying their rosters star rates. In the last seven seasons, the Los Angeles Clippers, known as one of the great cheapskate organizations in professional sports, have paid their players an average $19 million less than the Los Angeles Lakers'. The Clippers have made the playoffs twice in that span—as many times as the Lakers have won the NBA title. Have the Clippers only been a Kobe Bryant away from being as good as the Lakers? No chance, but Bryant's contract has been the difference between the Lakers' and Clippers' payrolls.

As a result of having Bryant. along with other stars and only a slightly higher payroll than their cross-arena rivals, the Lakers have paid $1,574,343 per win over the past seven seasons, compared to $1,918,457 for the Clippers. For a team like the Clippers to compete, they needed to get a star player in the draft (Blake Griffin) and then blow up the rest of their roster to add more stars (Chris Paul). As a result, the Clippers' window to compete is as long as Griffin and Paul stick around. Then the process restars—just ask the Cleveland Cavaliers about life after LeBron James.

Why isn’t either side filled with contenders? The devil is in the details—notice that the spread between No. 1 and No. 30 is much slimmer in hockey than it is in baseball or basketball. The median cost of an NHL win over the course of the last CBA was $1,142,920, and with every team coming within $300,000 of that figure, the tie between spending and winning is weaker—on the graph of payroll and wins, NHL teams don't hug the trendline quite as closely as their counterparts.

Another way to look at it is to plot wins against their individual cost. On these graphs, the disparity is clear.

For baseball teams, each successive win tends to cost more. The outliers tend to be as a result of management, whether it’s the shrewdness of the Rays, the ineptitude of the Mets and Cubs, or the money-is-no-object method of the Yankees, who have found that there are diminishing returns—there is only so far that money can go, because you can’t just buy a 162-0 season. If they could, they would.

The NBA’s trendline for cost-per-win against wins is the opposite of MLB’s, with teams receiving a bulk rate for their victories. This makes sense because of the smaller disparity between payrolls in the NBA—with teams mostly locked into the same salary range, successful teams will naturally wind up paying less per win.

There is another advantage to NHL owners not only in having a cap, but in tightening the screws as revenues continue to grow. When the Flyers come up against the cap, they are regularly able to wheel and deal their way out of the crunch thanks to the maneuvering of general manager Paul Holmgren, who last summer remade his team by trading Jeff Carter and Mike Richards, and bringing in free-agent goaltender Ilya Bryzgalov.

If the Flyers called Citizens Bank Park home more than once in their history, it would be a very different story. In baseball, only a few teams can take on bad contracts in trades. When the Red Sox decided to blow up their overpriced roster this summer, there were only a few teams they knew they could deal with, because only a few teams could afford their players—one being the Los Angeles Dodgers.

The NHL’s system allows more teams to be in play for big names—there is no way that Carter would have been traded to MLB’s equivalent of the Columbus Blue Jackets, and it is unthinkable that the Minnesota Wild, as a baseball team, would have been able to sign Zach Parise and Ryan Suter for a combined $198 million.

That’s great if all of those deals work out, but if Parise and Suter flop Minnesota, the Wild will have a much harder time digging out. Just ask the Blue Jackets, whose summer makeover in 2011 was a spectacular failure, and who then found themselves trading Carter at a loss, and eventually, Rick Nash as well. It should be a long time before Columbus has a contender, whereas baseball’s small-market teams find ways to win without trying to spend with the big boys—that’s what “Moneyball” was all about, and now the A’s have reinvented themselves to become a playoff team once again.

Even as some NBA teams look to "Moneyball" style methods to try to compete with the league's titans, it is easier to foresee the Pirates going to the World Series in the next five years than the Bucks going to the NBA Finals. Neither the Bucs nor the Bucks are particularly likely finalists or champions, but with neither organization in position to build a superteam, Pittsburgh's path is easier—big-market retreads such as A.J. Burnett have a far better chance of making a meaningful impact for a small-market team than their basketball counterparts, like Samuel Dalembert.

Both the MLB system and the NBA system do offer competitive balance, but for baseball, it’s on the field, while for basketball, it’s in the form of near-uniform payrolls. Players play, owners own, and the places they seek to encourage competitive balance in the NHL reflect that as much as the backgrounds of the negotiators for each side.